Shakespeare, Feminism and Gender

Kate Chedgzoy

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2000
• Print ISBN:
  9780333716526
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781350310261
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Modern Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Over the last quarter-century, feminist criticism of Shakespeare has greatly expanded and enriched the range of interpretations of the Shakespearean texts, their original historical location, and subsequent reinterpretation. Characteristically it weaves between past and present, driven by a commitment both to intervene in contemporary cultural politics and to recover a fuller sense of the sexual politics of the literary heritage. Collecting together essays which offer detailed accounts of particular plays with others that take a broader overview of the field, this Casebook showcases the range of critical strategies used by feminist criticism, and illustrates how vital attention to the politics of gender and sexuality is to a full understanding and appreciation of Shakespearean drama.

1

The Patriarchal Bard: Feminist Criticism and Shakespeare: King Lear and Measure for Measure

KATHLEEN MCLUSKIE

I

Every feminist critic has encountered the archly disingenuous question ‘What exactly is feminist criticism?’ The only effective response is ‘I’ll send you a booklist’, for feminist criticism can only be defined by the multiplicity of critical practices engaged in by feminists. Owing its origins to a popular political movement, it reproduces the varied theoretical positions of that movement. Sociologists and theorists of culture have, for example, investigated the processes by which representations of women in advertising and film reproduce and reinforce dominant definitions of sexuality and sexual relations so as to perpetuate their ideological power.¹ Within English departments critical activity has been divided among those who revived and privileged the work of women writers and those who have focused critical attention on reinterpreting literary texts from the traditional canon. In the case of Shakespeare, feminist critics have contested the apparent misogyny of the plays and the resistance of their feminist students by directing attention to the ‘world’ of the plays, using conventional tools of interpretation to assess Shakespeare’s attitude to the events within it.²

In a number of essays³ the feminist concern with traditional evaluations of sexual identity has been used to explore the importance of ideals of violence in the psychological formation of Shakespeare’s male characters.⁴ Janet Adelman has analysed the importance of structures of psychological dependence in accounting for Coriolanus’s phallic aggression⁵ and Coppélia Kahn has described the feud in Romeo and Juliet as ‘the deadly rite de passage that promotes masculinity at the price of life’.⁶ These essays have built on and developed a feminist psychoanalysis⁷ which places motherhood at the centre of psychological development, as Coppélia Kahn makes explicit in her book Masculine Identity in Shakespeare: ‘the critical threat to identity is not, as Freud maintains, castration, but engulfment by the mother … men first know women as the matrix of all satisfaction from which they must struggle to differentiate themselves … [Shakespeare] explores the unconscious attitudes behind cultural definitions of manliness and womanliness and behind the mores and institutions shaped by them’.⁸

Modern feminist psychoanalysis could be applied to Shakespearean characters for the texts were seen as unproblematically mimetic: ‘Shakespeare and Freud deal with the same subject: the expressed and hidden feelings in the human heart. They are both psychologists’.⁹ Shakespeare was thus constructed as an authoritative figure whose views about men and women could be co-opted to the liberal feminism of the critic. Within this critical practice, academic debate centred on conflicts over the authors’ views rather than on the systems of representation or the literary traditions which informed the texts. Linda Bamber, for example, reminded her readers of the evident misogyny of Shakespeare’s treatment of his tragic heroines and placed her own work ‘in reaction against the tendency for feminist critics to interpret Shakespeare as if his work directly supports and develops feminist ideas’.¹⁰ While noting the fundamental inconsistencies between Shakespeare’s treatment of women in comedy and tragedy, she explicitly resists the temptation ‘to revel in them offered by post-structuralism’. She finds instead a cohering principle in Shakespeare’s recognition of women as ‘other’, which ‘amounts to sexism only if the writer fails to attribute to opposite sex characters the privileges of the other’.¹¹ In tragedy his women are strong because they are coherent – ‘certainly none of the women in the tragedies worries or changes her mind about who she is’ – and the attacks which are made on them are the product of male resentment at this strength – ‘misogyny and sex nausea are born of failure and self doubt’.¹² The comic feminine, on the other hand, is opposed not to men but to a reified ‘society’: ‘In comedy the feminine either rebels against the restraining social order or (more commonly) presides in alliance with the forces which challenge its hegemony: romantic love, physical nature, the love of pleasure in all its forms’.¹³

These assertions rest on a reductive application of feminist anthropological discussions of nature and culture but their primary effect is to construct an author whose views can be applied in moral terms to rally and exhort the women readers of today: ‘the comic heroines show us how to regard ourselves as other … the heroines laugh to see themselves absorbed into the ordinary human comedy; the heroes rage and weep at the difficulty of actually being as extraordinary as they feel themselves to be’.¹⁴ These moral characteristics ascribed to men and women take no account of their particular circumstances within the texts, nor indeed of their material circumstances and the differential power relations which they support. Feminism thus involves defining certain characteristics as feminine and admiring them as a better way to survive in the world. In order to assert the moral connection between the mimetic world of Shakespeare’s plays and the real world of the audience, the characters have to be seen as representative men and women and the categories male and female are essential, unchanging, definable in modern, commonsense terms.

The essentialism of this form of feminism is further developed in Marilyn French’s Shakespeare’s Division of Experience. Like Bamber, she constructs a god-like author who ‘breathed life into his female characters and gave body to the principles they are supposed to represent’.¹⁵ Although shored up by references to feminist philosophy and anthropology, this feminine principle amounts to little more than the power to nurture and give birth and is opposed to a masculine principle embodied in the ability to kill. These principles are not, however, located in specific men or women. When men are approved of they are seen as embracing feminine principles whereas women are denied access to the male and are denigrated when they aspire to male qualities. French suggests that Shakespeare divides experience into male (evil) and female (good) principles and his comedies and tragedies are interpreted as ‘either a synthesis of the principles or an examination of the kinds of worlds that result when one or other principle is abused, neglected, devalued or exiled’.¹⁶

The essentialism which lies behind Marilyn French’s and Linda Bamber’s account of the men and women in Shakespeare is part of a trend in liberal feminism which sees the feminist struggle as concerned with reordering the values ascribed to men and women without fundamentally changing the material circumstances in which their relationships function. It presents feminism as a set of social attitudes rather than as a project for fundamental social change. As such it can equally easily be applied to an analysis of Shakespeare’s plays which situates them in the ideological currents of his own time. In Shakespeare and the Nature of Women, for example, Juliet Dusinberre admires ‘Shakespeare’s concern … to dissolve artificial distinctions between the sexes’¹⁷ and can claim that concern as feminist in both twentieth-century and seventeenth-century terms. She examines Shakespeare’s women characters – and those of some of his contemporaries – in the light of Renaissance debates over women conducted in Puritan handbooks and advice literature. Building on the Hallers’ essay ‘The Puritan Art of Love’,¹⁸ she notes the shift from misogyny associated with Catholic asceticism to Puritan assertions of the importance of women in the godly household as partners in holy and companionate marriage. The main portion of the book is an elaboration of themes – Chastity, Equality, Gods and Devils – in both polemic and dramatic literature. The strength of her argument lies in its description of the literary shift from the discourses of love poetry and satire to those of drama. However, her assertions about the feminism of Shakespeare and his contemporaries depend once again upon a mimetic model of the relationship between ideas and drama. Contemporary controversy about women is seen as a static body of ideas which can be used or rejected by dramatists whose primary concern is not with parallel fictions but simply to ‘explore the real nature of women’. By focusing on the presentation of women in Puritan advice literature, Dusinberre privileges one side of a contemporary debate, relegating expressions of misogyny to the fictional world of ‘literary simplification’ and arbitrarily asserting more progressive notions as the dramatists’ true point of view.¹⁹

A more complex discussion of the case would acknowledge that the issues of sex, sexuality, sexual relations and sexual division were areas of conflict of which the contradictions of writing about women were only one manifestation alongside the complexity of legislation and other forms of social control of sex and the family. The debates in modern historiography on these questions indicate the difficulty of assigning monolithic economic or ideological models to the early modern family, while the work of regional historians has shown the importance of specific material conditions on both the ideology and practice of sexual relations.²⁰ Far from being an unproblematic concept, ‘the nature of women’ was under severe pressure from both ideological discourses and the real concomitants of inflation and demographic change.

The problem with the mimetic, essentialist model of feminist criticism is that it would require a more multi-faceted mirror than Shakespearean drama to reflect the full complexity of the nature of women in Shakespeare’s time or our own. Moreover this model obscures the particular relationship between Shakespearean drama and its readers which feminist criticism implies. The demands of the academy insist that feminist critics reject ‘a literary version of placard carrying’,²¹ but they cannot but reveal the extent to which their critical practice expresses new demands and a new focus of attention on the plays. Coppélia Kahn concedes that ‘Today we are questioning the cultural definitions of sexual identity we have inherited. I believe Shakespeare questioned them too …’,²² and, rather more frankly, Linda Bamber explains: ‘As a heterosexual feminist … I have found in Shakespeare what I want to imagine as a possibility in my own life’.²³ However, the alternative to this simple co-option of Shakespeare is not to assert some spurious notion of objectivity. Such a procedure usually implies a denigration of feminism²⁴ in favour of more conventional positions and draws the criticism back into the institutionalised competition over ‘readings’.

A different procedure would involve theorising the relationship between feminism and the plays more explicitly, accepting that feminist criticism, like all criticism, is a reconstruction of the play’s meaning and asserting the specificity of a feminist response. This procedure differs from claiming Shakespeare’s views as feminist in refusing to construct an author behind the plays and paying attention instead to the narrative, poetic and theatrical strategies which construct the plays’ meanings and position the audience to understand their events from a particular point of view. For Shakespeare’s plays are not primarily explorations of ‘the real nature of women’ or even ‘the hidden feelings in the human heart’. They were the products of an entertainment industry which, as far as we know, had no women shareholders, actors, writers, or stage hands. His women characters were played by boys and, far from his plays being an expression of his idiosyncratic views, they all built on and adapted earlier stories.

The witty comic heroines, the powerful tragic figures, the opposition between realism and romance were the commonplaces of the literary tradition from which these tests emerged. Sex and sexual relations within them are, in the first analysis, sources of comedy, narrative resolution and coups de théâtre. These textual strategies limit the range of meaning which the text allows and circumscribe the position which a feminist reader may adopt vis-à-vis the treatment of gender relations and sexual politics within the plays. The feminist reader may resist the position which the text offers but resistance involves more than simple attitudinising.

II

In traditional criticism Shakespeare’s plays are seldom regarded as the sum of their dramatic devices. The social location of the action, their visual dimension and the frequent claims they make for their own authenticity, invite an audience’s engagement at a level beyond the plot. The audience is invited to make some connection between the events of the action and the form and pressure of their own world. In the case of sex and gender, the concern...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• General Editors’ Preface
• Introduction
• 1. The Patriarchal Bard: Feminist Criticism and Shakespeare: King Lear and Measure for Measure
• 2. Feminist Theory and the Editing of Shakespeare: The Taming of the Shrew Revisited
• 3. Women’s Alternative Shakespeares and Women’s Alternatives to Shakespeare in Contemporary British Theatre
• 4. Gender and Nation: Anticipations of Modernity in the Second Tetralogy
• 5. How to Read The Merchant of Venice without being Heterosexist
• 6. The Homoerotics of Shakespearean Comedy
• 7. Mourning and Misogyny: Hamlet and the Final Progress of Elizabeth I
• 8. He do Cressida in Different Voices
• 9. Revolutions, Petty Tyranny and the Murderous Husband
• 10. Macbeth and the All-singing, All-dancing Plays of the Jacobean Witch-vogue
• 11. The Colour of Patriarchy: Critical Difference, Cultural Difference and Renaissance Drama
• Further Reading
• Notes on Contributors
• Index